A minimum bounding box or minimum bounding rectangle is the smallest box or rectangle that completely encloses a two dimensional object, such as a rectangle or polygon, within its two dimensional (x, y) coordinate system. Minimum bounding boxes can be used as an indication of the general position of a geographic feature or dataset for display, first approximation spatial query, or spatial indexing purposes.
When labels or images need to be placed within the boundaries of arbitrary shapes, an interior bounding box may be utilized. An interior bounding box is a rectangle that defines the area within which items, such as labels, images, text, and/or other information, can be placed such that these items are guaranteed to lie within the boundaries of the arbitrary shape.
Prior art solutions generated the interior bounding box by manually specifying its size. Alternatively, other prior art solutions approximated the interior bounding box by using the shape's minimum bounding box, which, as discussed above, is the smallest rectangle that completely contains the arbitrary shape.